Composition of place
Composition of place
In Brief
Stephen begins his Shakespeare talk in Scylla and
Charybdis by inviting his listeners to imagine a scene
from the playwright's life. "It is this hour of a day in mid
June," he says, just like the present moment in Dublin, but
the year is 1601 and the place is the south bank of the Thames
in greater London. Throwing out vivid details, he thinks,
"Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices."
The method in his madness becomes clear a moment later: "Composition
of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!"
Such setting of an imagined scene, using the powers of the
senses to heighten mental awareness, was the foundation for
meditative practices devised by the
founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius Loyola. Stephen
follows Loyola's prescription by beginning his prolonged
meditation on Shakespeare with the setting of a scene, and as
the talk proceeds he returns often to the principle of
creating vivid sensory pictures to engage the minds of his
listeners.
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In the early 1520s Loyola made a retreat at an abbey on a
Catalonian mountain where the Benedictine monks introduced him
to certain techniques of spiritual meditation, and he began
composing, in Spanish, the devotional manual that
would be published in Latin translation in 1548 as Spiritual
Exercises. This work recommends 30 days of silent,
solitary pondering of religious themes: events in the life of
Jesus, the Savior's crucifixion and resurrection, the loving
forgiveness of human sin manifested in God's sacrifice of his
Son. The purpose is to bring the contemplator into a state of
closeness with God—a quasi-mystical direct contact with the
ineffable—by pondering important theological issues and
seeking to align one's will more nearly with the divine will.
Despite this highly abstract goal, many of the exercises
begin quite mundanely with "application of the senses." They
recommend taking a passage from the gospels, imagining the
scene in great concrete detail, concentrating on its sights,
sounds, smells, textures, and even tastes, and dwelling
quietly with the feelings and thoughts that arise in response.
Immersed in the physical reality of the event, the meditator
finds a corporeal foundation for intellectual and spiritual
activity. Gifford quotes an especially relevant passage from
the First Exercise, item 47: "The first prelude is a
composition, seeing the place. Here it is to be observed
that in the contemplation or meditation of a visible object as
in contemplating Christ our Lord, Who is visible, the
composition will be to see with the eye of the imagination the
corporeal place where the object I wish to contemplate is
found. I say the corporeal place, such as the Temple or the
mountain where Jesus Christ is found..."
The Spiritual Exercises fed into various streams of
European culture: the revival of Catholic spirituality
initiated by the counter-Reformation in the mid-16th century;
the writings of John Donne and other English "metaphysical"
poets of the 17th century; the pedagogical methods of Jesuit
high schools and colleges in the 19th century. In that last
category, the impact of Loyola's style of meditation is
powerfully represented in the third part of A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man when a Jesuit priest puts the
fear of God into Stephen Dedalus and his classmates on a
religious retreat. The terrifying pictures of Hell conjured up
by the priest's sermons do not conform to Loyola's recommended
subject matters: instead of contemplating Jesus' sufferings to
gain awareness of God's abundant mercies they require the boys
to ponder the eternal tortures awaiting sinners' poor
spiritual choices. The method, however, is unmistakably
Loyolan: set a scene, rub your audience's nose, eyes, ears,
tongue, and skin in it, and set them on a cognitive path that
will bring them back to God.
Stephen appears deeply committed to this method of winning
over an audience, albeit for non-devotional purposes. Asking
them to call to mind a June day like the one they are
presently in, he evokes the sight of the flag flying in front
of the Globe theater, the growls of "The bear Sackerson" in
the bearbaiting pit next door, the rough textures and
vertiginous sensations of "The canvasclimbers who sailed with
Drake," the smells and tastes of their sausages as they stand
crowded in among the groundlings. Shakespeare walks by swans
along the Thames on his way to the theater, watching a mother
busily herd her offspring into the rushes. The actor playing
the ghost in Hamlet steps onto the stage, "a wellset
man with a bass voice." All the senses are engaged in this
brief prelude to Stephen's Shakespeare meditations.
After the introductory scene-setting Stephen's thoughts
become more abstract, but he returns again and again to
concrete sensory details: "She bore his children and she laid
pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed when he lay on
his deathbed'; "poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of
hounds, the studded bridle and her blue windows"; "a boldfaced
Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger
than herself"; "Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded";
"Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of
roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies"; "Why
did he not leave her his best bed if he wished her to snore
away the rest of her nights in peace?"; "loosing her nightly
waters on the jordan"; "His eyes watched it, lowlying on the
horizon, eastward of the bear, as he walked by the slumberous
summer fields at midnight returning from Shottery and from her
arms." A large number of these vivid details concern Anne
Hathaway, whose adultery is central to Stephen's argument
about Shakespeare.
Loyola's insistence on the importance of involving the human
sensorium in spiritual practice provided one of the key
weapons in the counter-Reformation's defense of Catholic
practices (e.g., transubstantiation, omnipresent paintings and
sculptures, lush music, clouds of incense, crucifixes with
bloody Christs hanging from them) against Protestant
insistence on spare surroundings and pure internality. It is
also of a piece with the interest in lived physical experience
that Stephen defines as Aristotelian, against the otherworldly
abstractions of Platonism. His vivid pictures are not only an
attempt to engage his listeners' imaginations. They are also a
rejection of their inclination to respond to art as if all
that matters is "ideas, formless spiritual essences."
